skunks, poems, and paper work

After reading Granny Fran's post this morning, I searched for this poem by Naomi Shihab Nye. I love everything about this poem from the opening lines to the closing lines. Although I've had one unpleasant experience with skunks (getting rid of the odor on a sprayed dog is a matter of time and great effort), my affinity for skunks is a result of a childhood experience in which Laddie was entranced by the pet skunk of someone he knew. He wanted to get us one, but Mother said that although they were beautiful creatures, they were not pets and it would be like having a pet racoon or flying squirrel. We knew people who had tried to keep these as pets with unsatisfactory results. So the "poems that
[have] been hiding in the eyes of skunks for centuries" will remain in the images from Nye's poem.

I used to have a collection of pig poems (a favorite unlovely one was by Sylvia Plath). Another one was by Plath's husband, Ted Hughes, and others by Wendell Berry and Elizabeth Bishop and Louise Gluck. All were copies I made from various anthologies, and I don't know where they are now. Except for children's poems, pig poems are usually unlovely, but with vivid imagery.

And then there are the bat poems. Next week, a bat poem...

I've made progress at the office. To say they were behind in their filing is an understatement; each pile has to be separated by company, then by well name, then by date. THEN they can be filed...if they can be squeezed in.

The floor is a useful sorting place, but my knees were a wreck after sitting cross-legged amid the piles reciting: BPPJ 18, Brooks 18-1, Jeter 23 -1, Jeter 23-5, Dance 1, Kincaid 1, Dance 2, Tomkins 3, Garret 3-B and on and on.

Another view of bat-face cuphea and a bat poem

Last week I mentioned the possibility of a "bat" poem. I have two favorites and will use The Bat by Theodore Roethke this week. Bats always fascinate people and can inspire fierce loyalty or gothic fear- partly because, as Roethke says, "... something is amiss or out of place /When mice with wings can wear a human face." Naturalist Diane Ackerman's The Moon by Whale Light (mentioned in an earlier post) contains the most wonderful essay on bats and is certainly worth reading even if naturalist essays are not your thing --because Ackerman can make you feel as if you're reading short stories. A couple of years ago my husband (also a bat afficionato) built a bat house for our yard; unfortunately, squirrels took possession and have fended off any other possible house hunters.

Roethke (winner of numerous awards including the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1954) is one of my favorite poets;I posted his villanelle The Waking last August, and he has so many other poems that appeal to me.

Bats in the Belfry

Last Thursday, I used Roethke's poem "The Bat." This week, I searched on line for a copy of Randall Jarrell's poem "Bats," but never found a complete version. So back to my trusted copy:

Bats

A bat is born
Naked and blind and pale.
His mother makes a pocket of her tail
And catches him. He clings to her long fur
By his thumbs and toes and teeth.
And then the mother dances through the night
Doubling and looping, soaring, somersaulting--
Her baby hangs on underneath.
All night, in happiness, she hunts and flies.
Her high sharp cries
Like shining needlepoints of sound
Go out into the night and, echoing back,
Tell her what they have touched.
She hears how far it is, how big it is,
Which way it's going:
She lives by hearing.
The mother eats the moths and gnats she catches
In full flight; in full flight
The mother drinks the water of the pond
She skims across. Her baby hangs on tight.
Her baby drinks the milk she makes him
In moonlight or starlight, in mid-air.
Their single shadow, printed on the moon
Or fluttering across the stars,
Whirls on all night; at daybreak
The tired mother flaps home to her rafter.
The others all are there.
They hang themselves up by their toes,
They wrap themselves in their brown wings.
Bunched upside-down, they sleep in air.
Their sharp ears, their sharp teeth, their quick sharp faces
Are dull and slow and mild.
All the bright day, as the mother sleeps,
She folds her wings about her sleeping child.

Perhaps Jarrell's best known poems are "The Death of the Ball-Turret Gunner" and "Eighth Air Force"... the differences between the war poems and this poem are notable. A new discovery in my Jarrell searches: his children's book "The Bat Poet" --illustrated by Maurice Sendak--was among the Best Illustrated Children's Books 1964 (NYT) Year's Best Juveniles 1964 (NYT).